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This paper investigates the effects of input and interaction as
separate entities and in combination. We further investigate these
effects as a function of different language areas. One hundred two
learners of L2 Spanish were provided with input on (a) Spanish gender
agreement (noun + adjective), (b) estar + location, and (c)
seven vocabulary items. There were four conditions: (a) material
focused solely on input, (b) material focused solely on interaction,
(c) input-focused material followed by interaction, and (d)
interaction-focused material followed by input. A control group
completed a pretest and posttest. In general, greatest improvement from
pretest to posttest for all conditions was noted for vocabulary.
Learners exposed to input and interaction in combination showed greater
improvement than those in conditions with only input or only
interaction. In the two grammatical areas (gender agreement and
estar + location), learners who received interaction followed
by input showed greatest improvement. We consider issues such as
complexity and abstractness to account for the findings of differential
effects on language areas.Funding for this
project was provided by a federal grant from the U.S. Department of
Education to the Center for Language Education and Research at Michigan
State University (P229A990012 and P229A020001). We would like to thank
George Sirbu and Pingping Ni for help with the statistics of this study.
We are also grateful to the anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful
comments on an earlier version of this paper. All errors remain our
own.

The effects of age of acquisition and native language prosody on the
acquisition of English stress patterns were investigated with early and
late Korean-English bilinguals (n = 20). Distributional patterns
of stress placement based on syllabic structure, distributional patterns
of stress placement based on lexical class, and stress patterns of
phonologically similar words were investigated for their effect on the
placement of stress in English nonwords. Both bilingual groups—like
the native English controls—showed extension of stress patterns from
phonologically similar real words. The effect of syllabic structure for
early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers, and
late bilinguals showed more reduced effects. Unlike previous work with
Spanish-English bilinguals, Korean-English bilinguals demonstrated a
nonnativelike effect of lexical class, most pronounced in the late
bilinguals. This difference might be due to Koreans' low sensitivity
to word-level statistical distributions because of early exposure to a
phrase-level prosodic system.This research
was supported by a grant (DC05132) from the National Institutes of Health
(National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders). Thanks
are extended to J. J. Clark for her help in administering the experiments
and to Kyoung-Ho Kang for help locating participants. I would also like to
thank the four anonymous SSLA reviewers, Jonathan Loftin, and
Lisa Redford for valuable comments on an earlier version of this
article.

Incidental focus on form overtly draws learners' attention to
linguistic items as they arise spontaneously—without prior
planning—in meaning-focused interaction. This study examined the
effectiveness of incidental focus on form in promoting second language
(L2) learning. Seventeen hours of naturally occurring, meaning-focused L2
lessons were observed in 12 different classes of young adults in a private
language school in Auckland, New Zealand. A total of 491 focus-on-form
episodes (FFEs) were identified and used as a basis for individualized
test items in which participants who participated in specific FFEs were
asked to recall the linguistic information provided in them. The results
revealed that learners were able to recall the targeted linguistic
information correctly or partially correctly nearly 60% of the time 1 day
after the FFE, and 50% of the time 2 weeks later. Furthermore, successful
uptake in a FFE was found to be a significant predictor of correct test
scores. These results suggest that incidental focus on form might be
beneficial to learners, particularly if they incorporate the targeted
linguistic items into their own production.This research was supported, in part, by a scholarship from
the Foundation for Science, Research, and Technology, New Zealand. The
author would like to thank the teachers and participants who kindly gave
of their time to participate in this study. The author would also like to
thank Rod Ellis, Catherine Elder, Helen Basturkmen, Rosemary Erlam,
Jenefer Philp, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their
valuable input and feedback on this study. Earlier versions of this paper
were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of
Applied Linguistics in 2002 (Salt Lake City, UT) and at AILA 2002
(Singapore).

There are good theoretical and educational reasons to place matters of
implicit and explicit learning high on the agenda for SLA research. As for
theoretical motivations, perhaps the most central issue in SLA theory
construction in need of explanation is the differential success in
one's first language (L1) and in one's second language (L2).
Although acquisition of an L1 results in full mastery of the language
(provided that children are exposed to sufficient quantities of input and
do not suffer from mental disabilities), learners of an L2—even
after many years of L2 exposure—differ widely in level of
attainment. How can we explain universal success in the case of L1
acquisition and differential success in the case of L2 acquisition? Among
the many explanations that have been proposed, including brain maturation
and brain adaptation processes (critical period), access to Universal
Grammar, L1 interference, and sociopsychological factors (see Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003, for a review), one
finds explanations that involve the notions of implicit and explicit
learning. Scholars working in different disciplines, in different
theoretical schools, and sometimes using different terminology have argued
that L1 acquisition (or at least the acquisition of L1 grammar) relies
principally on processes of what we might now call implicit learning,
whereas the acquisition of an L2 often relies on both implicit and
explicit learning (Bley-Vroman, 1991; DeKeyser, 2003; N. Ellis, this issue; R. Ellis, 2004; Krashen,
1981; Reber & Allen, 2000).I am grateful to Rod Ellis for his thoughtful
comments on previous versions of this text.

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive
vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying
English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed
sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five
aspects of vocabulary knowledge—orthography, syntax, association,
grammatical functions, and meaning and form—were each measured by
receptive and productive tests. The study uses an innovative
methodology in that each target word was tested in 10 different ways.
The first experiment showed that, when the same amount of time was
spent on both tasks, the reading task was superior. The second
experiment showed that, when the allotted time on tasks depends on the
amount of time needed for completion, with the writing task requiring
more time, the writing task was more effective. If the second
experiment represents authentic learning, then a stronger argument can
be made to use productive vocabulary learning tasks over receptive
tasks.I wish to acknowledge the generous
input of the following people in the evolution of this paper: Paul
Nation, Jonathan Newton, and Jim Dickie from Victoria University of
Wellington, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers, for their
helpful comments.

Stable nonnative varieties of English acquired and used in the absence
of native English input can diverge systematically from native varieties
over time (Cheshire, 1991; Kachru, 1983; Platt, Weber, &
Ho, 1984). Focusing on Indian English article use, this study asks
the following question: If divergence is indeed occurring, do new features
derive primarily from first language (L1) transfer or from universal
principles? Natural conversational speech is assessed in relation to four
hypotheses relating to L1 transfer and language universals, and a
multivariate regression analysis evaluates the relative strength of each
factor. The new article system is not found to be identical to the L1
article system. Although L1 transfer appears to be operative when an overt
form (the specific indefinite article) exists in the L1, when a gap occurs
in the L1 (no definite article), speakers do not completely omit the
definite article in their second language English. Using Prince's
(1981) taxonomy of assumed familiarity, it is
shown that the absence of a L1 model for definite articles permits the
intervention of universally available discourse knowledge, such that
speakers apply an economical, disambiguating principle to the use of overt
articles, reserving them mainly for new (less given or inferable)
information and omitting them in more redundant contexts.I am indebted to John Rickford, Elizabeth
Traugott, Arnold Zwicky, Ishtla Singh, and the SSLA editors and
anonymous reviewers for much helpful feedback. I also received valuable
comments from audiences at the LSA, Atlanta (January 2003) and at UC Davis
and UC San Diego (February 2003).

A problem facing investigations of implicit and explicit learning is
the lack of valid measures of second language implicit and explicit
knowledge. This paper attempts to establish operational definitions of
these two constructs and reports a psychometric study of a battery of
tests designed to provide relatively independent measures of them. These
tests were (a) an oral imitation test involving grammatical and
ungrammatical sentences, (b) an oral narration test, (c) a timed
grammaticality judgment test (GJT), (d) an untimed GJT with the same
content, and (e) a metalinguistic knowledge test. Tests (a), (b), and (c)
were designed as measures of implicit knowledge, and tests (d) and (e)
were designed as measures of explicit knowledge. All of the tests examined
17 English grammatical structures. A principal component factor analysis
produced two clear factors. This analysis showed that the scores from
tests (a), (b), and (c) loaded on Factor 1, whereas the scores from
ungrammatical sentences in test (d) and total scores from test (e) loaded
on Factor 2. These two factors are interpreted as corresponding to
implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. A number of secondary
analyses to support this interpretation of the construct validity of the
tests are also reported.This research was
funded by a Marsden Fund grant awarded by the Royal Society of Arts of New
Zealand to Rod Ellis and Cathie Elder. Other researchers who contributed
to the research are Shawn Loewen, Rosemary Erlam, Satomi Mizutani, and
Shuhei Hidaka.The author wishes to thank Nick Ellis, Jim Lantolf, and two
anonymous SSLA reviewers. Their constructive comments have helped
me to present the theoretical background of the study more convincingly
and to remove errors from the results and refine my interpretations of
them.

This study examined the effects of acoustic variability on second
language vocabulary learning. English native speakers learned new words in
Spanish. Exposure frequency to the words was constant. Dependent measures
were accuracy and latency of picture-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English
recall. Experiment 1 compared presentation formats of neutral
(conversational) voice only, three voice types, and six voice types. No
significant differences emerged. Experiment 2 compared presentation
formats of one speaker, three speakers, and six speakers. Vocabulary
learning was superior in the higher-variability conditions. Experiment 3
partially replicated Experiment 1 while rotating voice types across
subjects in moderate and no-variability conditions. Vocabulary learning
was superior in the higher variability conditions. These results are
consistent with an exemplar-based theory of initial lexical learning and
representation.Portions of these data were
presented at the 143rd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in
Cancun, Mexico and at the Fourth International Conference on the Mental
Lexicon in Windsor, Canada. The authors would like to thank Paola Rijos
for help in data collection and scoring and the anonymous SSLA
reviewers.

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the
contributions of explicit and implicit processes during second language
(L2) sentence comprehension. We used a L2 grammaticality judgment task
(GJT) to test 20 native English speakers enrolled in the first four
semesters of Spanish while recording both accuracy and ERP data. Because
end-of-sentence grammaticality judgments are open to conscious inspection,
we reasoned that they can be influenced by strategic processes that
reflect on formal rules and therefore reflect primarily offline explicit
processing. On the other hand, because ERPs are a direct reflection of
online processing, they reflect automatic, nonreflective, implicit
responses to stimuli (Osterhout, Bersick, &
McLaughlin, 1997; Rugg et al., 1998;
Tachibana et al., 1999).

We used a version of the GJT adapted for the ERP environment. The
experimental sentences varied the form of three different syntactic
constructions: (a) tense-marking, which is formed similarly in the first
language (L1) and the L2; (b) determiner number agreement, which is formed
differently in the L1 and the L2; and (c) determiner gender agreement,
which is unique to the L2. We examined ERP responses during a time period
between 500 and 900 ms following the onset of the critical (violation or
matched control) word in the sentence because extensive past research has
shown that grammatical violations elicit a positive-going deflection in
the ERP waveform during this period (e.g., the “P600”; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992).

We found that learners were sensitive (i.e., showed different brain
responses to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences) to violations in L2
for constructions that are formed similarly in the L1 and the L2, but were
not sensitive to violations for constructions that differ in the L1 and
the L2. Critically, a robust grammaticality effect was found in the ERP
data for the construction that was unique to the L2, suggesting that the
learners were implicitly sensitive to these violations. Judgment accuracy
was near chance for all constructions. These findings suggest that
learners are able to implicitly process some aspects of L2 syntax even in
early stages of learning but that this knowledge depends on the similarity
between the L1 and the L2. Furthermore, there is a divergence between
explicit and implicit measures of L2 learning, which might be due to the
behavioral task demands (e.g., McLaughlin, Osterhout,
& Kim, 2004). We conclude that comparing ERP and behavioral
data could provide a sensitive method for measuring implicit
processing.This research was supported by a
National Institutes of Health Individual National Research Service Award
(NIH HD42948-01) awarded to Natasha Tokowicz and a National Institutes of
Health Institutional National Research Service Award (T32 MH19102) awarded
to Brian MacWhinney. We thank Beatrice DeAngelis, Dayne Grove, Kwan
Hansongkitpong, Katie Keil, Lee Osterhout, Chuck Perfetti, Kelley Sacco,
Alex Waid, and Eddie Wlotko for their assistance with this project. We
gratefully acknowledge the comments of Rod Ellis, Jan Hulstijn, Albert
Valdman, and the two anonymous SSLA reviewers on earlier versions
of this manuscript. A portion of these results was presented at the 43rd
Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2002, November).

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from
different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek)
and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online
reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance
wh-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence
of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2
learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase
directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the
subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This
finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative
comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.Theodore Marinis is now working at the Centre
for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience,
University College London, and Leah Roberts is at the
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. The research
reported here was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00
213B to H. Clahsen, C. Felser, and R. Hawkins), which is gratefully
acknowledged. We thank Bob Borsley, Roger Hawkins, Andrew Radford, the
audiences at EUROSLA 12, the 24th Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Sprachwissenschaft Meeting, the 27th annual Boston University
Conference on Language Development, EUROSLA 13, three anonymous
SSLA reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Ritta
Husted and Michaela Wenzlaff for helping with the data collection. We
also wish to thank Ted Gibson and Tessa Warren for making their
prepublication manuscript available to us.

The purpose of the present study was to determine what features
associated with the macrolevel of lexical competence vary as a function of
an increase in second language (L2) proficiency. The macrolevel of
participants' word knowledge was described with respect to six
variables that are commonly associated with three proposed macrolevel
dimensions, namely quantity, quality, and metacognitive awareness.
Sixty-four participants (native speakers of English, L2 advanced learners,
and intermediate learners of English) self-rated their familiarity with 73
lexical items and were asked to generate word associations to the words
they identified in a verifiable way as known. The data analyses showed
that some measures, such as vocabulary size, word frequency effects,
number of associations, and within-group consistency of participants'
associative domain, are more sensitive to L2 learners' increasing
proficiency than others (e.g., nativelike commonality of associations). We
thus conclude that some aspects, such as quality and quantity of L2
lexical competence, develop as the proficiency of the L2 learners
increases, whereas others, such as learners' metacognitive awareness,
are not proficiency dependent. We also suggest that the measures that were
identified as sensitive to capturing the overall state of L2
learners' vocabularies would also be reliable indexes of
learners' proficiency development.

The present study addresses the reactivity of two types of verbal
protocols in SLA research. It expands on the work of Leow and Morgan-Short
(2004), who found nonmetalinguistic
verbalization during a second-language reading task to be nonreactive for
beginning learners' text comprehension, intake, and production of the
targeted morphological form. The present study investigated the reactivity
of both metalinguistic and nonmetalinguistic protocols, using a syntactic
structure and advanced language learners of Spanish. Results indicated
that neither type of verbalization significantly affected text
comprehension or written production of old or new exemplars of the
targeted structure when compared to a control group, although
metalinguistic verbalization appeared to cause a significant decrease in
text comprehension over nonmetalinguistic verbalization. Furthermore, both
types of verbalization significantly increased the amount of time on
task.

Swain's (1985, 1995, 2000) output
hypothesis states that language production is facilitative of second
language (L2) learning. An important component of the output hypothesis
involves pushing learners to produce appropriate, accurate,
and complex language (Swain, 1993), which may
occur when interlocutors provide learners with negative feedback (Gass,
1997, 2003; Long, 1996; Mackey, in press;
Pica, 1994; Swain &
Lapkin, 1995). When learners modify their previous utterances in
response to negative feedback, learning opportunities are created by
both the provision of negative feedback and the production of modified
output. Consequently, it is difficult to determine how these
interactional features—alone or in combination—positively
impact L2 development. The current study examines the impact of
negative feedback and learners' responses on English as a second
language (ESL) question development, which is operationalized as stage
advancement in Pienemann and Johnston's developmental sequence for
ESL question formation (Pienemann & Johnston,
1987; Pienemann, Johnston, & Brindley,
1988). Thai English as a foreign language (EFL) learners
(n = 60) carried out a series of communicative tasks with
native English speakers in four conditions that provided different
negative feedback and modified output opportunities and also completed
four oral production tests over an 8-week period. Analysis of the
treatment data identified the amount of modified output involving
developmentally advanced question forms produced by the learners, and
analysis of the test data revealed whether the learners' stage
assignment changed over time. Logistic regression indicated that the
only significant predictor of ESL question development was the
production of modified output involving developmentally advanced
question forms in response to negative feedback.I am grateful to Alison Mackey for her insightful comments
on this paper and on the dissertation research on which it is based. I
also thank Rhonda Oliver, Jeff Connor-Linton, Jennifer Leeman, Jenefer
Philp, Ana-Maria Nuevo, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for
their valuable comments. Any errors, of course, are my own.

Flege, Bohn, and Jang (1997) and Escudero
and Boersma (2004) analyzed first
language-Spanish second language-English listeners' perception of
English /i/–/i/ continua that varied in
spectral and duration properties. They compared individuals and groups on
the basis of spectral reliance and duration reliance measures. These
reliance measures indicate the change in identification rates from one
extreme of the stimulus space to the other; they make use of only a
portion of the data collected and suffer from a ceiling effect. The
current paper presents a reanalysis of Escudero and Boersma's data
using first-order logistic regression modeling. All of the available data
contribute to the calculation of logistic regression coefficients, and
they do not suffer from the same ceiling effect as the reliance measures.
It is argued that—as a metric of cue weighting—logistic
regression coefficients offer methodological and substantive advantages
over the reliance measures.My thanks to
Paola Escudero and Paul Boersma for making their data available, and
thanks to Terrance M. Nearey for comments on an earlier draft of this
paper (any defects are my own responsibility). This work was supported by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.

This study examines whether aural processing of input in a situation
of implicit instruction can build a knowledge base that is available for
both comprehension and production tasks. Fifty-five Dutch students learned
a miniature linguistic system based on Spanish. Three training conditions
were compared in which noun-adjective gender agreement was the learning
target. The first group of participants received receptive training, the
second group received receptive and productive training, and a third group
served as a control. The control group received no training of the target
structure and only read an explanation of the target structure rule.
Receptive knowledge was assessed with a self-paced listening test, a
match-mismatch test, and a grammaticality judgment task. Productive
knowledge was tested with a picture description task in single- and
dual-task conditions. A postexperimental questionnaire tested whether any
explicit knowledge had been induced. Results suggest that the receptive
and receptive + productive training programs succeeded in building a
knowledge base that was used in comprehension but much less so in
production. These results will be interpreted in light of processing and
the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge.I would like to express my gratitude to Jan Hulstijn and Rob
Schoonen from the University of Amsterdam for their supervision. I would
also like to thank the two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their
comments and Nick Ellis for taking time to discuss this project with
me.

After a long dry spell in which there were few—if
any—satisfactory introductory texts in semantics and pragmatics
available, the first edition of Saeed's Semantics appeared
in 1997. Since then, a number of other texts have appeared: de
Swart's Introduction to natural language semantics (1998),
Kearns' Semantics (2000), Allan's Natural language
semantics (2001), among others. The primary advantage of the original
Saeed text as well as this revised and updated version is its
comprehensiveness. It includes descriptive lexical semantics, an
introduction to formal semantics, the cognitive approaches of Lakoff and
others, and more pragmatics than most of its competitors.

This paper reports replications of studies of implicit artificial
grammar (AG) learning and explicit series-solution learning with
experienced second language learners in order to examine their population
and content generalizability. As found by Reber, Walkenfeld, and Hernstadt
(1991), there was significantly greater variance
in explicit compared to implicit learning. In contrast to Reber et
al.'s findings, intelligence quotient (IQ) was significantly
negatively related to implicit learning. As found by Knowlton and Squire
(1996), chunks that appeared with high frequency
(high chunk-strength) in AG training influenced incorrect acceptance of
ungrammatical transfer test items containing them but did not affect the
judgments of grammatical items. In a third experiment, learners
semantically processed sentences in Samoan, a novel language for this
population. This experiment found little evidence for the content
generalizability of these AG findings to the incidental learning of
Samoan. Implicit AG and incidental Samoan learning had different patterns
of correlation with cognitive abilities (IQ, working memory, and aptitude)
and differed in sensitivity to chunk-strength. As found for AG learning,
high chunk-strength negatively affected correct rejection of ungrammatical
Samoan transfer test items. Additionally, high chunk-strength negatively
affected correct acceptance of grammatical items. For these grammatical
items, the number of chunks they contained—not their frequency
during training—positively influenced grammaticality judgments.I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments
and advice on this paper given by the editors of this special issue, Jan
Hulstijn and Rod Ellis, and also by Nick Ellis, Barbara Knowlton, and two
anonymous SSLA reviewers.

This book presents an overview of the parameter setting theory of
learnability in first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition within
the generative linguistic framework. It also attempts to challenge and
refine common assumptions underlying the model. The book comprises five
central chapters as well as short introductory and concluding chapters.
The introductory chapter summarizes the general aim of the book and the
specific aims of the chapters to follow. In chapter 2, Ayoun presents
historical background on the concept of parameter throughout
different versions of generative linguistics and distinguishes the
standard notion of parameter from the notions of associated clusters of
structures, microparameters (referring to structures), and
macroparameters (which apply to a family of typologically different
languages). This chapter also reviews the concept of parameter setting
for language changes, creole formation, computational linguistics, and
neurolinguistics, ending with a brief discussion of Universal Grammar
and the Critical Period Hypothesis. In brief, this chapter argues that
the parameter setting approach is a model worthy of further development
and refinement, capable of explaining and predicting a wide range of
phenomena in linguistic theory and its applications despite
misunderstandings and lack of clarity in the field.

Morrison (this issue) criticized the analytical and statistical
methods that Escudero and Boersma (2004) used
for assessing the participants' cue weightings in their listening
experiments. He proposed that logistic regression constitutes a better
method for measuring perceptual cue weighting than Escudero and
Boersma's “edge difference ratio.” The present paper
starts by summarizing and illustrating Escudero and Boersma's
experiment and analysis method and then addresses five of Morrison's
objections—namely the alleged ceiling effect, the alleged
superiority of logistic regression, the problem of discarding data, the
(dis)confirmation of two-category assimilation, and Escudero and
Boersma's grouping of the data. We will argue that although logistic
regression is a very good method for measuring cue weighting, there was
nothing wrong with Escudero and Boersma's methodology in these five
respects.